Prior to starring in an Emmy-winning series, Ted Lasso starred in a 2013 marketing campaign for NBC after the network obtained Premier League broadcast rights to the United States. .
The announcement followed the same premise of fish out of water as the program that later inspired it: Lasso, played by Jason Sudeikis, was a red-blooded American football coach hired by Tottenham Hotspur who struggled to understand the basics. basics of “football.”
In one scene, Lasso receives information from his assistant about the two most important clubs in England.
Manchester United, he is told, are “super rich” and “everyone loves or hates them”.
“Dallas Cowboys,” Lasso replies, playing a round of word association between sports.
Liverpool “used to be great,” the assistant points out, but “they haven’t won a title in a long time.”
“Also Dallas Cowboys,” Lasso says.
The settings could use an update. Liverpool, of course, have since returned to the top of both England and Europe. Manchester United are as polarizing as ever, and still spend a lot of money, but the club inspires more schadenfreude among their rivals than when the ad was first aired.
The Cowboys, however, remain as they were: loved and hated with the same abundance, a generation far removed from their glory years, and, above all, “super rich.”
America’s Team will be on the training field next week in Oxnard, California, to begin preparations for the 2022 season, 27 years since its last Super Bowl-winning campaign. Dallas has set a 4-11 playoff record since then and has not advanced beyond the second round of the postseason. Thirteen different franchises, including two of its hated division rivals, have won the title since the Cowboys ’last championship season, and Dallas was eclipsed this century by both the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New England Patriots with the most wins. Super Bowl of all time. There have also been ignominies off the field, most recently, a $ 2.4 million deal stemming from allegations that a Cowboys executive filmed the team’s cheerleaders in the locker room.
But neither the bottom game nor the scandal have slowed the Cowboys ’growth. The team star burns brighter than other American sports supernovae, consuming national consciousness to a degree that not even the New York Yankees or Los Angeles Lakers can match. Dallas will play five games in prime time this season, the maximum number a team can play in the tent slot, and the team is a perennial A1 subject in sports media, regardless of their record.
“They’re still‘ America’s Team, ’” said Kurt Badenhausen, a reporter for sports business website Sportico. “It’s still the most watched team. All the networks want as many Cowboys games as they can. They have the largest fan base in the country.”
In the financial column, the Cowboys are undefeated; even in the midst of a Super Bowl drought, money is still raining in Dallas. The Cowboys have topped Forbes ’list of the most valuable sports franchises each year since 2016. And at a time when teams are selling for ever-increasing sums, the Cowboys would probably have the highest price, if ever. for sale. market. Forbes set the value of the Cowboys at $ 6.5 billion, but it’s almost certainly too low.
Jerry Jones, the indomitable owner of the team, said in May that he believes the Cowboys could get at least $ 10 billion in the open market, a decent return on the $ 150 million he paid to take over the franchise in 1989.
Jones made it clear that he “will never sell the Cowboys,” but his team’s high rating is a testament to the financial power of America’s most popular sports league.
“It really comes down to the NFL’s economic structure,” said Badenhausen, who helped start the annual ranking of the most valuable sports franchises on Forbes in 1998.
The NFL is the richest sports league in the world. It raises billions of dollars each year, most of which comes from its mammoth deals with streaming and streaming partners, and the money is evenly distributed among its 32 teams. Badenhausen said the league generated revenue of approximately $ 18 billion in 2021, which put it on track to reach its $ 25 billion goal in 2027. Last year, the NFL signed a contract. of an average of $ 113 billion with CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN and Amazon extending to 2033, an agreement that will bring each team about $ 300 million annually.
The deal affirmed NFL status not only as the biggest attraction of American sports, but also the country’s top entertainment attraction. Seventy-five of the 100 most-watched TV shows in the United States last year were NFL games.
“The sport itself is so popular,” said Marc Ganis, a sports business consultant who has helped manage equipment sales and stadium development throughout the NFL. “The games are competitive, the players keep improving and it’s something that has become part of American culture. If it weren’t for that, the rest wouldn’t go in its place.”
The NFL imposes a salary cap that limits the amount of money each team can spend on players, a feature that has promoted parity on the field and brought greater benefits to the owner’s coffers.
Badenhausen said the combination of the league’s amazing wealth and how this money is spent has resulted in higher ratings for NFL franchises than even teams with a larger global footprint. More than half of the top 50 teams in Forbes ’most recent ranking came from the NFL, including three in the top 10.
“These big European clubs are big global brands, but valuations don’t fit the size of the brand because of the economic structures of these clubs and what it takes to be competitive,” Badenhausen said. “You have a handful of clubs in an unrestricted arms race.”
The recent sales of the Denver Broncos and Chelsea FC were illustrative. Chelsea, one of England’s “big six” clubs and based in a major European capital, earned $ 3.2 billion. The Broncos, ranked by Forbes as the 10th most valuable team in the NFL and located outside of one of the major U.S. markets, sold for $ 4.65 billion.
“Chelsea is a much bigger brand globally than the Denver Broncos, but because of the economy, a second-quarter NFL team ends up selling for more than Chelsea,” Badenhausen said.
The economic structure that has enriched the Cowboys and the other 31 teams in the league is one that Jones played a prominent role in building. In 1993, Jones orchestrated a deal with Rupert Murdoch that resulted in Fox replacing CBS as one of the NFL’s television partners. CBS offered the league less than it had previously paid for the broadcast rights. Murdoch, with Jones in his corner, secured Fox’s rights in a $ 1.6 billion deal for four years, 60 percent more than CBS offered.
“Jerry brought in Fox. Fox drastically raised the royalty rate. CBS lost the NFL,” Ganis said. “A story tells you about both the Cowboys and the NFL.”
Jones took the NFL to court in 1995 for league rules that limited a team’s ability to reach its own support agreements. Seeking to capitalize on the Cowboys ’iconic brand, Jones negotiated stadium sponsorships with Pepsi, Nike and American Express. The NFL sued Jones, arguing that those deals were inconsistent with the league’s sponsorship deals. Jones responded with his own antitrust lawsuit against the league, arguing that the NFL effectively managed a cartel that controlled the teams ’logos and trademarks.
Both parties settled, allowing Jones, and all other league owners, to sign their own sponsorship deals.
“It changed the economy of the league in terms of what the teams could do,” Badenhausen said. “He went out and sold the Cowboys to the sponsorship market more strongly than anyone. As a result, and because they have the brand to back them up, he has been able to monetize.
Under Jones, the Cowboys have expanded their feud in North Texas to create even more sponsorship deals and business opportunities. The team opened a brilliant new stadium in 2009 that has a capacity for more than 100,000 seats, and a new 91-acre training facility in 2016 that serves as the team’s world headquarters.
The Cowboys have also been successful in growing their fan base outside of Texas. It has long been a source of fun for many in the lone star state that the team has a lot of support in the Washington DC area, home to its divisional rivals, the Commanders. Some attribute this to the fact that the Cowboys were an integrated team from birth, unlike the Washington NFL team, and Dallas has a large following among the black population of DC.
Badenhausen placed the Cowboys ’value at $ 6.92 billion in their team valuation ranking for Sportico last year and said they were ready to be“ the first American sports team to generate annual revenue from ‘a million dollars’.
Ganis believes Jones would get at least $ 8 billion if he put the Cowboys on the market, saying the value of the team has been boosted by these new facilities and the overall prosperity of the league.
But, according to Ganis, the main reason for this assessment is the man who turned the team into a cow of money.
“The Cowboys are built on an extraordinary foundation,” Ganis said. “Add Jerry Jones to this alchemy and it becomes something that is extraordinary globally.”
